Nathaniel philbrick the last stand custer, sittin orn (v5 0)

CHAPTER 1At the Flood High up in his floating tower, Captain Grant Marsh guided the riverboat Far West toward Fort Lincoln, the home of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the

CHAPTER 1 - At the Flood

CHAPTER 2 - The Dream

CHAPTER 3 - Hard Ass

CHAPTER 4 - The Dance

CHAPTER 5 - The Scout

CHAPTER 6 - The Blue Pencil Line

CHAPTER 7 - The Approach

CHAPTER 8 - The Crow’s Nest

CHAPTER 9 - Into the Valley

CHAPTER 10 - Reno’s Charge

CHAPTER 11 - To the Hill

CHAPTER 12 - Still Point

CHAPTER 13 - The Forsaken

CHAPTER 14 - Grazing His Horses

CHAPTER 15 - The Last Stand

CHAPTER 16 - The River of Nightmares

ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

The Passionate Sailor

Away Off Shore:

Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890

Abram’s Eyes:

The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island

Second Wind:

A Sunfish Sailor’s Odyssey

In the Heart of the Sea:

The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

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Copyright © Nathaniel Philbrick, 2010

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To Melissa

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord, to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!

Custer’s Smile

It was, he later admitted, a “rashly imprudent” act He and his regiment were pursuing hostile Indians

across the plains of Kansas, a portion of the country about which he knew almost nothing And yet,when his pack of English greyhounds began to chase some an-telope over a distant hill, he could notresist the temptation to follow It wasn’t long before he and his big, powerful horse and his dogs hadleft the regiment far behind

Only gradually did he realize that these rolling green hills possessed a secret It seemed as if thepeak up ahead was high enough for him to catch a glimpse of the regiment somewhere back there inthe distance But each time he and his horse reached the top of a rise, he discovered that his view ofthe horizon was blocked by the surrounding hills Like a shipwrecked sailor bobbing in the giantswells left by a recent storm, he was enveloped by wind-rippled crests and troughs of grass and wassoon completely lost

In less than a decade this same trick of western topography would lure him to his death on a topped hill beside a river called the Little Bighorn On that day in Kansas, however, GeorgeArmstrong Custer quickly forgot about his regiment and the Indians they were supposedly pursuingwhen he saw his first buffalo: an enormous, shaggy bull In the years to come he would see hundreds

flat-of thousands flat-of these creatures, but none, he later claimed, as large as this one He put his spurs to hishorse’s sides and began the chase

Both Custer and his horse were veterans of the recent war Indeed, Custer had gained a reputation

as one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers Wearing a sombrero-like hat, with long blond ringletsflowing down to his shoulders, he proved to be a true prodigy of war—charismatic, quirky, andfearless—and by the age of twenty-three, just two years after finishing last in his class at West Point,

he had been named a brigadier general

In the two years since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Custer had come to long for the battlefield.Only amid the smoke, blood, and confusion of war had his fidgety and ambitious mind found peace.But now, in the spring of 1867, as his trusted horse galloped to within shooting range of the buffalo,

he began to feel some of the old wild joy Amid the beat of hooves and the bellowslike suck and blast

of air through his horse’s nostrils emerged the transcendent presence of the buffalo: ancient, vast, andimpossibly strong in its thundering charge across the infinite plains He couldn’t help but shout withexcitement As he drew close, he held out his pearl-handled pistol and started to plunge the barrelinto the dusty funk of the buffalo’s fur, only to withdraw the weapon so as to, in his own words,

“prolong the enjoyment of the race.”

After several more minutes of pursuit, he decided it was finally time for the kill Once again he

pushed the gun into the creature’s pelt As if sensing Custer’s intentions, the buffalo abruptly turnedtoward the horse.

It all happened in an instant: The horse veered away from the buffalo’s horns, and when Custertried to grab the reins with both hands, his finger accidentally pulled the trigger and fired a bullet intothe horse’s head, killing him instantly Custer had just enough time to disengage his feet from thestirrups before he was catapulted over the neck of the collapsing animal He tumbled onto the ground,struggled to his feet, and faced his erstwhile prey Instead of charging, the buffalo simply stared at thisstrange, outlandish creature and stalked off

Horseless and alone in Indian country—except for his panting dogs—George Custer began the longand uncertain walk back to his regiment

Like many Americans, I first learned about George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn not in

school but at the movies For me, a child of the Vietnam War era, Custer was the deranged maniac of

Little Big Man For those of my parents’ generation, who grew up during World War II, Custer was

the noble hero played by Errol Flynn in They Died with Their Boots On In both instances, Custer

was more of a cultural lightning rod than a historical figure, an icon instead of a man

Custer’s transformation into an American myth had much to do with the timing of the disaster.When word of his defeat first reached the American public on July 7, 1876, the nation was in themidst of celebrating the centennial of its glorious birth For a nation drunk on its own potency and

power, the news came as a frightening shock Much like the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic

thirty-six years later, the devastating defeat of America’s most famous Indian fighter just when the Westseemed finally won caused an entire nation to wonder how this could have happened We have beentrying to figure it out ever since

Long before Custer died at the Little Bighorn, the myth of the Last Stand already had a strong pull

on human emotions, and on the way we like to remember history The variations are endless—fromthe three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae to Davy Crockett at the Alamo—but they all tell the story

of a brave and intractable hero leading his tiny band against a numberless foe Even though the oddsare overwhelming, the hero and his followers fight on nobly to the end and are slaughtered to a man

In defeat the hero of the Last Stand achieves the greatest of victories, since he will be remembered forall time

When it comes to the Little Bighorn, most Americans think of the Last Stand as belonging solely toGeorge Armstrong Custer But the myth applies equally to his legendary opponent Sitting Bull Forwhile the Sioux and Cheyenne were the victors that day, the battle marked the beginning of their ownLast Stand The shock and outrage surrounding Custer’s stunning defeat allowed the Grantadministration to push through measures that the U.S Congress would not have funded just a fewweeks before The army redoubled its efforts against the Indians and built several forts on what hadpreviously been considered Native land Within a few years of the Little Bighorn, all the major triballeaders had taken up residence on Indian reservations, with one exception Not until the summer of

1881 did Sitting Bull submit to U.S authorities, but only after first handing his rifle to his sonCrowfoot, who then gave the weapon to an army officer “I wish it to be remembered that I was the

last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” Sitting Bull said “This boy has given it to you, and henow wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

Sitting Bull did not go quietly into the dark night of reservation life at the Standing Rock Agency inwhat would become North and South Dakota Even as the number of his supporters dwindled, he didhis best to frustrate the attempts of the reservation’s agent, Major James McLaughlin, to reduce hisinfluence within the tribe Tensions between the two men inevitably mounted, and when a new Nativereligious movement called the Ghost Dance caused authorities to fear a possible insurrection,McLaughlin ordered Sitting Bull’s arrest A group of Native police were sent to his cabin on theGrand River, and at dawn on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull, along with Crowfoot and SittingBull’s adopted brother Jumping Bull, was shot to death A handful of Sitting Bull’s supporters fled tothe Pine Ridge Agency to the south, where Custer’s old regiment, the Seventh Cavalry, had beencalled in to put a stop to the Ghost Dance craze The massacre that unfolded on December 29 at acreek called Wounded Knee was seen by at least some of the officers of the Seventh Cavalry asoverdue revenge for their defeat at the Little Bighorn

This is the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but it is also the story of two Last Stands, for it

is impossible to understand the one without the other

By refusing to back down in the face of impossible odds, the heroes of the Last Stand project an aura

of righteous and charismatic determination But when does resistance to the inevitable simply become

an expression of personal ego or, even worse, of narrow-minded nostalgia for a vanished past?

Custer embraced the notion of the warrior as a seventeenth-century cavalier: the long-hairedromantic with his dogs and his flamboyant clothes cheerfully leading his men into the maw of death.Even when presented with the devastating specter of total war at Gettysburg and Antietam, and laterwith the sordid, hardly heroic reality of the Indian wars of the West, where torching a village ofnoncombatants was considered a great victory, Custer managed to see himself as the dashing, ever-gallant dragoon

For his part, Sitting Bull clung defiantly to traditional Lakota ways even though by the summer of

1877 most other Native leaders had come to realize that, like it or not, some kind of compromise wasunavoidable Instead of negotiating with the U.S government, Sitting Bull turned his back and walkedaway Like Custer galloping into a hostile village of unknown size, Sitting Bull had no interest invisiting Washington, D.C., prior to his surrender and seeing for himself the true scope of whatthreatened his people from the east

And yet, both Custer and Sitting Bull were more than the cardboard cutouts they have sincebecome Instead of stubborn anachronisms, they were cagey manipulators of the media of their day.Custer’s published accounts of his exploits gave him a public reputation out of all proportion to hisactual accomplishments—at least that’s what more than a few fellow army officers claimed SittingBull gave a series of newspaper interviews in the aftermath of the Little Bighorn that helped makehim one of the most sought-after celebrities in America A tour with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Showonly heightened his visibility and also helped to engender the jealousy and resentment that ultimatelycontributed to his death once he returned to the reservation

Both Custer and Sitting Bull are often portrayed as grimly resolute in their determination to fight.But even as the first bullets were being fired upon his people, Sitting Bull held out hope that peace,not war, might be the ultimate result of the army’s appearance at the Little Bighorn Custer had

demonstrated a remarkable talent for negotiation and diplomacy prior to his last battle The tragedy ofboth their lives is that they were not given the opportunity to explore those alternatives Instead, theydied alongside their families (a son and a brother were killed with Sitting Bull; two brothers, abrother-in-law, and a nephew fell with Custer) and gained undying fame.

Americans have lived with the familiar images of the “Old West” for more than two centuries But for

those who actually participated in the events of that past, the West was dynamic, unpredictable, andstartlingly new Native horse culture was only a few generations old by the time Lewis and Clarkventured west in 1804, and ever-building pressure from the East meant that the tribes’ territories andalliances remained in near-constant flux throughout the nineteenth century

The legends notwithstanding, Custer’s regiment in 1876 was anything but an assemblage of faced Marlboro men Forty percent of the soldiers in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry had been born outsidethe United States in countries like Ireland, England, Germany, and Italy; of the Americans, almost all

craggy-of them had grown up east craggy-of the Mississippi River For this decidedly international collection craggy-ofsoldiers, the Plains were as strange and unworldly as the surface of the moon

Most of us were taught that the American frontier crept west like an inevitable tide Instead of aline, the frontier was an ever-constricting zone: a region of convulsive, often unpredictable changeacross which the American people, aided and abetted by the military, lurched and leapt into new andpotentially profitable lands

In 1876, there were no farms, ranches, towns, or even military bases in central and easternMontana For all practical and legal purposes, this was Indian territory Just two years before,however, gold had been discovered in the nearby Black Hills by an expedition led by none other thanGeorge Custer As prospectors flooded into the region, the U.S government decided that it had nochoice but to acquire the hills—by force if necessary—from the Indians Instead of an effort to defendinnocent American pioneers from Indian attack, the campaign against the Sioux and Cheyenne in thespring of 1876 was an unprovoked military invasion of an independent nation that already happened

to exist within what came to be declared the United States

America was not the only place in the world where Western and indigenous peoples were cominginto conflict in the late nineteenth century Little Bighorn–like battles had been or were about to befought in India, the Middle East, and Africa—most spectacularly, perhaps, at Isandlwana in 1879,when twenty-four thousand Zulus annihilated a British force of more than thirteen hundred men And

yet, there is something different about the American version of colonialism Since the battles were not

fought on a distant and colonized continent but within our own interior, we are living with theconsequences every day After four years of research and several trips to the battlefield, along with amemorable visit to the site of Sitting Bull’s cabin, I now know that nothing ended at the LittleBighorn

As a writer and a sailor, I have long been interested in what occurs within the behavioral laboratory

of a ship at sea The isolation, unpredictability, and inherent danger of life aboard a sailing vesselhave a tendency to heighten the intensity of social interaction, particularly when it comes to the issue

of leadership So it was, I have since discovered, with both a regiment of cavalry and a nomadicIndian village on the northern plains in 1876—two self-contained and highly structured communities

under enormous stress.

Sitting Bull had never seen the ocean, but as tensions mounted during the spring of 1876, hedescribed his people in terms to which any mariner could relate “We are,” he said, “an island ofIndians in a lake of whites.” Late in life, one of George Custer’s officers, Frederick Benteen, alsolooked to the water when considering his often contentious relationship with his former commander

“There are many excellent ways of finding out the disposition and nature of a man,” Benteen wrote “Iknow of no better way than having to live on shipboard with one for a series of years Next, indefault of salt-water facilities , campaign with a man in the cavalry, for say 10 or 20 years .Thus I became acquainted with General Custer.”

The fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially

in the midst of a calamity Even when people are bound by strict codes of behavior, their distinctivepersonalities have a way of asserting themselves Instead of a faceless “clash of cultures,” the Battle

of the Little Bighorn was fought by individual soldiers and warriors, each with his own story to tell

In the pages that follow I have attempted to do justice to those stories even as I tell the larger,ultimately tragic story of how two leaders and their followers embarked on two converging voyagesacross the river-ribbed interior of North America

The collision that occurred on June 25, 1876, resulted in three different battles with Sitting Bull’svillage of Sioux and Cheyenne: one fought by Custer; another fought by his second-in-command,Major Marcus Reno; and yet another fought, for all intents and purposes, by Captain FrederickBenteen Reno, Benteen, and a significant portion of their commands survived Custer and every one

of his officers and men were killed

Even before the battles were over, Reno and Benteen had begun to calculate how to put theiractions in the best possible light Perhaps not surprisingly, a subsequent court of inquiry onlycompounded the prevarications Problems of evidence also plagued Native accounts In the yearsafter the battle, warriors were concerned that they might suffer some form of retribution if they didn’ttell their white inquisitors what they wanted to hear Then there were the problems associated withthe interpreters, many of whom had their own agendas

At times during my research, it seemed as if I had entered a hall of mirrors Everywhere I turnedthere was yet another, fatally distorted account of the battle Like Custer struggling to find a peak fromwhich he could finally see around him, I searched desperately for a way to rise above the confusingwelter of conflicting points of view and identify what really happened

During my third visit to the battlefield, in the summer of 2009, as I followed a winding, steep-sidedravine toward the Little Bighorn, I realized my mistake It was not a question of rising above theevidence; it was a question of burrowing into the mystery

Custer and his men were last seen by their comrades galloping across a ridge before they

disappeared into the seductive green hills Not until two days later did the surviving members of theregiment find them: more than two hundred dead bodies, many of them hacked to pieces and bristlingwith arrows, putrefying in the summer sun Amid this “scene of sickening, ghastly horror,” they foundCuster lying faceup across two of his men with, Private Thomas Coleman wrote, “a smile on hisface.” Custer’s smile is the ultimate mystery of this story, the story of how America, the land ofliberty and justice for all, became in its centennial year the nation of the Last Stand

CHAPTER 1

At the Flood

High up in his floating tower, Captain Grant Marsh guided the riverboat Far West toward Fort

Lincoln, the home of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the U.S Army’s SeventhCavalry This was Marsh’s first trip up the Missouri since the ice and snow had closed the river theprevious fall, and like any good pilot he was carefully studying how the waterway had changed

Every year, the Missouri—at almost three thousand miles the longest river in the United States—reinvented itself Swollen by spring rain and snowmelt, the Missouri wriggled and squirmed like anoverloaded fire hose, blasting away tons of bottomland and, with it, grove after grove of cottonwoodtrees By May, the river was studded with partially sunken cottonwoods, their sodden root-ballsplanted firmly in the mud, their water-laved trunks angled downriver like spears

Nothing could punch a hole in the bottom of a wooden steamboat like the submerged tip of acottonwood tree Whereas the average life span of a seagoing vessel was twenty years, a Missouririverboat was lucky to last five

Rivers were the arteries, veins, and capillaries of the northern plains, the lifelines upon which allliving things depended Rivers determined the annual migration route of the buffalo herds, and it wasthe buffalo that governed the seasonal movements of the Indians For the U.S military, rivers were thepoint of entry into some of the country’s most inaccessible areas In May of 1876, before railroadsextended across Montana, rivers provided Custer’s Seventh Cavalry with provisions and equipment

via Grant Marsh and the Far West.

The boiling, tree-laden rivers of spring were full of hazards, but the most difficult challenge tonegotiating the Missouri came in the summer and fall, when the water level dropped A maddeningnetwork of sandbars emerged from the shallows, transforming the river into a series of slack-waterlakes If a boat was to make its way past these naturally occurring dams of silt and mud, it must not

only possess minimal draft but also be able to crawl across the river bottom By the late 1860s, what

came to be known as the Missouri riverboat had been perfected: an amphibious watercraft that rankswith the Bowie knife, barbed wire, and the Colt revolver as one of the quintessential innovations ofthe American West

Grant Marsh’s Far West was fairly typical Built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, by an owner who

believed that names with seven letters were lucky, she was 190 feet long with three decks, a

cupola-like pilothouse, and two towering smokestacks Unloaded, the Far West drew only twenty inches;

when carrying two hundred tons of freight, she sank down just ten additional inches for a total draft oftwo and a half feet She was also extremely powerful Sheltered between her first and second deckswere three boilers, which consumed as many as thirty cords of wood a day, along with two engineslinked to a single, thirty-foot-wide stern wheel When driven against a stiff current, every inch of the

Far West trembled and shook as the percussive exhaust of the high-pressure engines boomed like

cannon fire and the smokestacks, known as “iron chimneys,” poured out twin trails of soot and ash

It was the tangle of ropes and wooden poles on the bow that truly distinguished the Missouri

riverboat from her less adaptable counterparts on the Mississippi When the Far West grounded on a

bar, two spars the size of telegraph poles were swung out ahead of the bow and driven down into themud Block-and-tackle systems attached to the tops of the spars were then led to a pair of steam-powered capstans As the capstans winched the bow into the air on the crutchlike spars, the sternwheel drove the boat up and over the bar Instead of a watercraft, a Missouri riverboat looked somuch like a giant, smoke-belching insect as it lurched over the mud on two spindly legs that thistechnique of going where no riverboat had ever gone before became known as “grasshoppering.” Itmight take hours, sometimes days, to make it over a particularly nasty stretch of river bottom, butgrasshoppering meant that a riverboat was now something more than a means of transportation It was

an invasive species of empire

In the beginning, furs lured the boats up the Missouri; by the 1860s, it was gold that drew them asfar north and west as Fort Benton, twenty-three hundred miles above the mouth of the Missouri andalmost in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains In 1866, Grant Marsh, soon to become known as “theking of the pilots,” left Fort Benton with $1.25 million worth of gold, said to be the most valuablecargo ever sent down the Missouri

By that spring day in 1876, Marsh was no longer shipping gold out of the mountains of the West,but he was still working at the precious metal’s behest Two years before, George Custer had led anexpedition into the fabled Black Hills, an oval-shaped territory about the size of Connecticut in thesouthwest corner of modern South Dakota Part Garden of Eden, part El Dorado, the Black Hills were

a verdant and mountainous land of streams and lakes contained within a forbidding foot-high ridge of ancient rock covered in ponderosa pine When seen from a distance, these steep,tree-shaded battlements appeared as dark as night, hence the hills’ name Mysterious and remote (theywere separated from the nearest American settlement by a hundred miles of desolate badlands), theBlack Hills were sacred to the Sioux and—until Custer’s expedition—almost unknown to the whites,save for rumors of gold

four-thousand-In 1873, a financial panic gripped the country With the national debt over $2 billion, the Grantadministration was in desperate need of a way to replenish a cash-starved economy And as had beenproven in California back in 1849 and more recently in the Rockies, there was no quicker way toinvigorate the country’s financial system than to discover gold Despite the fact that it required them

to trespass on what was legally Sioux land, General Philip Sheridan, commander of the MilitaryDivision of the Missouri, which extended all the way west to the Rockies, ordered Custer and theSeventh Cavalry to escort an exploring expedition from Fort Lincoln, justdown the Missouri Riverfrom Bismarck, in modern North Dakota, to the Black Hills

The supposed aim of the Black Hills Expedition of 1874 was to find a suitable site for a fort.However, the makeup of the column suggested that another, far more exciting goal was beingconsidered Included in Custer’s thousand-man expedition were President Grant’s eldest son,Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Dent Grant; three newspaper reporters; a photographer; and twoexperienced gold miners

Much to Custer’s surprise, the Indians proved few and far between once the regiment entered theBlack Hills On August 2, after several delightful weeks among the flower-laden mountains and

valleys, the expedition discovered gold “right from the grass roots.” Over the next hundred years,more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) thanfrom any other mine in the continental United States.

In the beginning, the government made only nominal efforts to prevent miners from intruding on theBlack Hills But by the summer of 1875 there were so many U.S citizens in the region that the Grantadministration decided it must purchase the hills from the Sioux When the Sioux refused to sell, theadministration felt it had no choice but to instigate a war Once again, George Custer was called upon

to lend his air of gallantry and panache to the dirty work of American imperialism

The Sioux were told that they must report to a reservation by the end of January 1876 or beconsidered at war with the United States When Sitting Bull and his people did not respond to thesummons, it then became the army’s responsibility to bring in the “hostiles,” as the Indians whorefused to submit to government demands were called in official correspondence What was to havebeen a winter campaign sputtered and died in March without much result General Sheridan thenmade preparations for a three-pronged spring campaign The plan was for Custer’s Seventh Cavalry

to march west from Fort Lincoln in the Dakota Territory as troops led by Colonel John Gibbonmarched east from Fort Ellis in the Montana Territory and troops under General George Crookmarched north from Fort Fetterman in the Wyoming Territory Each of these converging groups ofsoldiers was referred to as a column—as in Custer’s Dakota Column—and with luck at least one ofthe columns would find the Indians

But as Custer prepared to lead his regiment against the Sioux in the spring of 1876, he wassuddenly ordered to Washington, D.C A Democrat-controlled congressional committee wanted him

to testify about corruption within the War Department of Grant’s Republican administration Eventhough he had a campaign to prepare for, Custer decided he had best head east

As it turned out, most of his testimony was based on hearsay and speculation This did not preventhim from eagerly implicating Grant’s secretary of war, William Belknap, who had already resigned

to escape impeachment, and President Grant’s brother Orville The president was outraged, anddespite the impending campaign, he blocked Custer’s return to his regiment Grant finally relented,but not without insisting that Custer’s superior, Brigadier General Alfred Terry, stationed atdepartment headquarters in St Paul, Minnesota, be named leader of the campaign to capture SittingBull, and in early May the two officers boarded the train for Bismarck

As Grant Marsh steamed up the Missouri toward Fort Lincoln, he wasn’t particularly concernedabout whether Custer or Terry was leading the regiment No matter who was in charge, Marsh and hisriverboat were still being paid $360 a day to provide the Seventh Cavalry with forage andammunition and whatever transportation assistance they might require But for George Custer, who

considered the regiment his, the presence of General Terry made all the difference in the world.

On May 10, 1876, as Terry and Custer traveled together by train from St Paul to Bismarck, President

Ulysses S Grant opened the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Like just abouteverything else associated with the final year of Grant’s two-term administration, the ceremony didnot go well

There were more than 186,000 people at the exhibition that day The fairgrounds, surrounded bythree miles of fence, contained two hundred buildings, including the two largest structures in theworld: the twenty-one-acre Main Building, housing exhibits related to mining, metallurgy,

manufacturing, and science, and Machinery Hall, containing the exhibition’s centerpiece, the giantCorliss Steam Engine Products displayed for the first time at the exhibition included Hires root beer,Heinz ketchup, the Remington typographic machine (later dubbed the typewriter), and AlexanderGraham Bell’s telephone.

By 11:45 a.m., when it came time for President Grant to make his remarks in front of MemorialHall, there were approximately four thousand notables assembled on the grandstands behind him.Included in that illustrious group were the generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan.Over the course of the last couple of days, Grant had been badgering these two old friends aboutGeorge Armstrong Custer.

Eleven years before, at the conclusion of the Civil War, it had been Custer who had spoiled whatshould have been Grant’s finest hour Thousands upon thousands of soldiers and spectators had

gathered on a beautiful spring day for the Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac in Washington,D.C The cavalry led the procession through the city, and as the troopers marched down PennsylvaniaAvenue toward Grant and the other dignitaries gathered in front of the White House, Custer’s horsesuddenly bolted from the ranks It was later said that a bouquet of flowers thrown to Custer from anadmiring young lady had startled his horse, but Grant must have had his doubts as he watched Custergallop to the head of the parade The only cadet at West Point to match his own record in riding andjumping a horse had been Custer, and there he was, alone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue,ostentatiously struggling to subdue his bucking steed Whether intentionally or not, Custer hadmanaged to make himself the center of attention.

Now, more than a decade later, in the final year of his second term as president, Grant watched inbaffled rage as his administration collapsed around him amid charges of corruption andincompetence At this dark and dismal hour, it was annoying in the extreme to have one of his own—

an army officer (and Custer at that!)—contribute to the onslaught Testifying against the secretary ofwar was bad enough, but to pull his brother Orville into the morass was unforgivable, and Grant hadresolved to make the blond-haired prima donna pay

He’d ordered Sheridan to detain Custer, then on his way back to Fort Lincoln, in Chicago Whenword of Custer’s arrest became public, the press had erupted in outrage, branding Grant the “modernCaesar.” “Are officers to be dragged from railroad trains and ignominiously ordered to stand

aside,” the New York Herald howled, “until the whims of the Chief magistrate are satisfied?”

Grant had relented, but not without putting Custer under the command of Terry, who was as modestand serene as Custer was pompous and frenetic Indeed, Terry, a courtly former lawyer from NewHaven, Connecticut, and the only non–West Point general in the post–Civil War army, was so

excruciatingly nice that it would more than likely drive Custer to distraction At least that was the

Atlantic as “the silent indifference” of the crowd’s reception.

It was astonishing how far Grant had plummeted After winning the war for Lincoln, he seemed onthe brink of even greater accomplishments as president of the United States With input from theQuakers, he’d adopted what he described as “an Indian policy founded on peace and Christianityrather than force of arms.” He even appointed his friend Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca, ascommissioner of Indian affairs But as it turned out, Parker lasted only a few years before a toxicmixture of greed and politics poisoned every one of Grant’s best intentions

It was more than a little ironic Despite all he’d hoped to do for the Indians, his administration nowfound itself in the midst of a squalid little war against the embattled Sioux and Cheyenne of thenorthern plains In the end, he had been powerless to stop the American push for more Not that hehad tried very hard or refused to let his own administration participate in the pillage, but it must havebeen sad and infuriating to see America’s celebration of its centennial come down to this: the rude,derisive silence of several thousand people withholding their applause

On May 10, 1876, the same day that President Grant spoke in Philadelphia, Custer and General Terry

arrived at Bismarck From there they took the ferry across the Missouri River to Fort Lincoln: aramshackle collection of wooden buildings surrounding a muddy parade ground with the wide brownditch of the river flowing beside it

There was room at Fort Lincoln for only a portion of the regiment, so a small city of tents hadsprung up beside it In addition to the twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry, there were severalcompanies of infantry housed in nearby Fort McKeen Sixty-five Arikara Indian scouts, who livedwith their families at Fort Lincoln in a hamlet of log huts, were also participating in the campaign,along with 114 teamsters and their large canvas-topped wagons, each pulled by six mules andcontaining between three thousand and five thousand pounds of forage General Terry, who hadgained fame near the close of the Civil War by leading an impeccably organized assault on thesupposedly impregnable Confederate stronghold at Fort Fisher, estimated that the column’s sixteenhundred horses and mules required a staggering twelve thousand pounds of grain a day By hiscalculations, they might need every one of these wagons before reaching the Yellowstone River,

where they would be replenished by the Far West.

There were hopes, however, that this might be a short campaign One hundred and fifty miles to thewest, approximately halfway between Fort Lincoln and their rendezvous point on the Yellowstone,was the Little Missouri River According to a recent scouting report, Sitting Bull was encampedsomewhere along this river with fifteen hundred lodges and three thousand warriors A force that sizewould have outnumbered the Seventh Cavalry’s approximately 750 officers and enlisted men byabout four to one But Custer did not appear concerned As he’d bragged to a group of businessmen inNew York City that spring, the Seventh Cavalry “could whip and defeat all the Indians on the plains.”

By most accounts, Custer was bubbling with even more than the usual enthusiasm when he arrived

at Fort Lincoln with his niece and nephew from Monroe, Michigan, and with two canaries for hiswife, Libbie One soldier described him as “happy as a boy with a new red sled.” General Grant haddone his best to ruin him, but thanks to the intercession of what he called “Custer luck,” he was back

at Fort Lincoln and on the cusp of yet another one of his spectacular comebacks The presence ofGeneral Terry was certainly a bother, but he had surmounted worse obstacles in the past

In the nine years since Custer chased his first buffalo across the plains of Kansas, his career had

zigged and zagged like the Missouri River His first summer in the West in 1867 had been filled withfrustration The Cheyenne had made a mockery of his attempts to pursue them When his men began todesert wholesale for the goldfields to the west, Custer overreacted and ordered some of them shot.But it was the long absence from his wife that finally undid him At least at night, Libbie had spentmuch of the Civil War by her husband’s side, but this wasn’t possible when chasing Indians acrossthe plains At one point, Custer abandoned his regiment and dashed to Libbie, covering more than 150miles on horseback in just sixty hours From Libbie’s standpoint, it was all wonderfully romantic andresulted in what she later remembered as “one long perfect day,” but it almost ruined Custer’s career

He was court-martialed and sentenced to a year’s unpaid leave

Outwardly, Custer remained unrepentant, claiming he’d been made a scapegoat for the failings of

his superiors Still, for a former major general who was now, under the diminished circumstances ofthe peacetime army, a mere lieutenant colonel (although, for courtesy’s sake, he was still addressed

as General Custer), this was a potentially disastrous development Then, as happened time and againthroughout his career, came the intervention of the miraculous bolt from the blue called Custer luck

On September 24, 1868, while killing time back home in Monroe, Michigan, Custer received atelegram from his old mentor, General Philip Sheridan

Sheridan wanted to try a new strategy against the Cheyenne Instead of chasing them around theplains in summer, why not strike them in winter, when they were confined to their tepees? Even afterthe legendary scout Jim Bridger attempted to convince him that it was madness to send a regiment ofcavalry into temperatures of forty below zero and howling snow, Sheridan remained convinced itwould work—especially if the operation was led by Custer, one of the most indefatigable andcourageous officers he’d ever known “Generals Sherman, Sully, and myself, and nearly all theofficers of your regiment, have asked for you ,” Sheridan’s telegram read “Can you come atonce?”

On November 27, 1868, after battling bitter cold and blinding, snow-reflected sun, Custer and theSeventh Cavalry decimated an Indian village beside the Washita River They then came close tobeing wiped out by a much larger village farther down the river, which they hadn’t detected prior tothe attack, but Custer succeeded in extracting most of his men and fifty or so Cheyenne hostagesbefore scurrying back to safety

Both Custer and Sheridan heralded the Battle of the Washita as a great victory, claiming that Custerhad killed more than a hundred warriors and almost eight hundred ponies, and destroyed largequantities of food and clothing But as a local Indian agent pointed out, the leader of the village hadbeen Black Kettle, a noted “peace chief” who had moved his people away from the larger village so

as not to be associated with the depredations of the village’s warriors Instead of striking a blowagainst the hostiles, Custer had unwittingly killed one of the few Cheyenne leaders who were forpeace

Custer dismissed such charges by claiming that it had been the hostile warriors’ trail that had ledhim to Black Kettle’s village In addition, his officers had found plenty of evidence while burning thetepees that Black Kettle’s warriors had participated in the recent attacks on the Kansas frontier Moretroubling, as far as Custer was concerned, was the publication of an anonymous letter in a St Louisnewspaper that accused him of abandoning one of the regiment’s most popular officers, Major JoelElliott, to an unspeakable death at the hands of the Cheyenne It was true that the naked and brutallymutilated bodies of Elliott and his men were found several weeks later, but Custer maintained that hehad no way of knowing in the midst of the battle what had happened to the missing men

When Custer learned of the letter’s publication, he immediately called a meeting of his officers.Slapping his boot tops with his rawhide riding whip, he threatened to “cowhide” whoever hadwritten the letter At that point, one of his senior commanders, Frederick Benteen, made a great show

of inspecting his pistol and then, after returning the weapon to its holster, stepped forward andadmitted to being the author Up until then, Benteen had proven to be a capable and reliable officer,and Custer appeared to be caught completely by surprise He stammered out, “Colonel Benteen, I’llsee you again, sir!” and dismissed the meeting Thus began one of the most fascinating, diabolicallytwisted antagonisms ever to haunt the hate-torn West

Custer responded to his detractors, both within and without the regiment, by turning himself into a

peacemaker Instead of torching Indian villages, he pursued a nervy, verging on suicidal, policy ofdiplomacy With several of his Cheyenne hostages providing interpretive help (including the beautifulCheyenne woman Monahsetah), he managed to find the supposedly unfindable hostile leaders, meetwith them, and eventually convince them to come into the agencies There were several times whentensions rose to the point that his own officers pleaded with him to attack instead of negotiate, butCuster was intent on proving that he wasn’t the heartless Indian killer that some had made him out to

be Custer’s efforts were crowned by the dramatic release of two white women hostages, both ofwhom had suffered, in the parlance of the plains, “a fate worse than death” during their captivity Bythe end of the year, peace had come to the plains of Kansas, concluding one of the most remarkableand, if such a thing is possible when it comes to Custer, little-known periods in his career

Custer was confident that a promotion was immediately forthcoming From the field he wrote toLibbie back at regimental headquarters, “[I]f everything works favorably, Custer luck is going tosurpass all former experience.” But the promotion never came

During the next two years Custer settled into his new role as a celebrity of the West He and Libbiehosted a series of recreational buffalo hunts, entertaining a dazzling assortment of politicians,businesspeople, entertainers, and even, on one notable occasion, the grand duke of Russia But allwas not well As a lieutenant colonel, Custer did not technically command the Seventh Cavalry; thatwas reserved to a full colonel, who during the Battle of the Washita had been conveniently assigned

to detached service, making Custer the senior officer In 1869, however, a new colonel, the ruggedlyhandsome Samuel Sturgis, became commander, and Custer was left, he complained to Sheridan, withnothing to do In a photograph of a Seventh Cavalry picnic, Sturgis and several other officers andtheir wives look pleasantly toward the camera while Custer lies on the grass with his face buried in anewspaper

In the early 1870s, the twelve companies of the Seventh Cavalry were recalled from the West andscattered throughout the Reconstruction South, where they assisted federal marshals in combating therise of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan During this period, as the notedwarrior Sitting Bull emerged as leader of the Sioux in the northern plains, Custer spent severalhumdrum years stationed in Kentucky The “aimlessness” of these days, Libbie wrote, “seemedinsupportable to my husband.” Finally, in the winter of 1873, he received word that the Seventh was

to be brought back together for duty in the Dakota Territory; best of all, Sheridan had arranged it soColonel Sturgis was to remain on detached service in St Louis Custer was so elated by the news that

he took up a chair and smashed it to pieces

The Northern Pacific Railway had plans to continue west from its current terminus at Bismarck,into the Montana Territory In anticipation of possible Native resistance, the Seventh Cavalry was toescort the surveying expedition, led by General David Stanley, as it made its way west along thenorth bank of the Yellowstone River Almost immediately, Custer reverted to the erratic, petulantbehavior of his early days in Kansas “He is making himself utterly detested,” one of his officersclaimed, “by his selfish, capricious, arbitrary and unjust conduct.” Custer floundered when presentedwith too many choices and not enough stimulation To no one’s surprise, he soon ran afoul of GeneralStanley

Custer, a teetotaler, blamed their differences on Stanley’s drinking, but much of their squabblinghad to do with Custer’s need to go his own way Eventually, however, the two officers reached anunderstanding Stanley gave Custer the independence he required, and in two skirmishes with the

Sioux, he proved that he was still a brave and skillful cavalry officer By the time the Seventh arrived

at the newly constructed Fort Lincoln in September, newspaper accounts of what came to be known

as the Yellowstone campaign had already circulated throughout the country, and Custer was onceagain a hero

The following year, Custer’s expedition to the Black Hills only added to his fame But by May

1876, with his ill-advised testimony in Washington threatening to turn even General Sheridan againsthim, he was in desperate need of yet another miraculous stroke of Custer luck

Upon his arrival at Fort Lincoln on May 10, Custer immediately decided to divide the Seventh into

two wings: one led by his second-in-command, Major Marcus Reno, the other by the regiment’ssenior captain, forty-two-year-old Frederick Benteen, the same officer who had, eight years before,dared to criticize his conduct at the Washita

It was an unusual move Benteen had made no secret of his continued contempt for Custer, and anappointment to wing commander was the last thing he had expected The next day, Custer called him

to his tent, where Custer was attending to regimental business with his wife, Libbie, by his side Itquickly became clear, at least to Benteen, what his commander was up to

Custer explained that while he was in Washington, D.C., he’d run into one of the most powerfulnewspapermen in the country, Lawrence Gobright, cofounder of the Associated Press During theCivil War Gobright had worked directly with the Lincoln administration in controlling the flow ofwar news to the American people This was just the kind of man any ambitious military officerneeded to have on his side

Much to Custer’s surprise, Gobright had proven to be “wonderfully interested” in FrederickBenteen It turned out that the two were cousins “Yes,” Benteen replied, “we’ve been very dearfriends always.” Suddenly Benteen understood the reason behind his elevation to wing commander

“Custer perhaps feared,” he wrote, “that I might possibly bring influence to bear at some time.” Afteralmost a decade, Custer, who enjoyed being the perennial darling of the press, now had a reason tocultivate the friendship of his nemesis

Benteen had blue eyes, a round cherubic face, and a thatch of boyishly cropped hair that had, overthe course of his tenure with the Seventh Cavalry, turned almost preternaturally white Unlike Custer,who spoke with such nervous rapidity that it was sometimes hard to understand what he was saying,Benteen had an easy, southern volubility about him Lurking beneath his chubby-cheeked cordialitywas a brooding, utterly cynical intelligence His icy blue eyes saw at a glance a person’s darkestinsecurities and inevitably found him or her wanting Custer was, by no means, the only commander

he had belittled and despised Virtually every officer he served under in the years ahead—fromColonel Samuel Sturgis to General Crook—was judged unworthy by Benteen “I’ve always knownthat I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,” he admitted late in life, “butwhat then? I couldn’t go otherwise—’twould be against the grain of myself.”

Even before this conversation about Lawrence Gobright, Custer had made overtures to Benteen “Ialways surmised ,” Benteen wrote, “that he wanted me badly as a friend.” Benteen dismissedthese gestures as part of a calculated attempt by Custer to elevate his own standing, both within the

regiment and, ultimately, with the American public, and he would have none of it Custer’s conspirator in this constant quest for acclaim was Libbie, whom Benteen regarded as “about as cold-blooded a woman as I ever knew, in which respect the pair were admirably mated.”

co-Benteen relished the fact that Custer and Libbie had been put on notice that there were “wheelswithin wheels,” and that he, the reviled white-haired underling, was the ultimate insider when it came

to the workings of the press He had used the papers once before to set Custer straight, and as wasnow clearer than ever, he could do it again

On May 16, 1876, with the regiment due to leave Fort Lincoln the next day, Custer requested that

General Terry meet him at the two-story house he shared with Libbie and their servants Of all therooms in this newly built Victorian home, Custer’s favorite was his study During the winters he often

spent almost the entire day holed up in the little room, poring over Burton’s The Anatomy of

Melancholy or a biography of Napoleon To make sure he remained undisturbed, he placed a printed

card on the door that read, “THIS IS MY BUSY DAY.”

During the Yellowstone campaign, Custer had learned the art of taxidermy, and the walls of hisstudy contained the heads of a buffalo, an antelope, a black-tailed deer, and the grizzly bear he’dbagged in the Black Hills At dusk Custer and Libbie, who had long since resigned themselves to theirchildlessness, liked to lounge within this crowded self-made world, with only the glowing embers ofthe fire to illuminate the unblinking glass eyes of the animals Custer had killed and stuffed Libbielater admitted that the study was a somewhat bizarre place for a husband and wife to linger lovingly

in each other’s presence “I used to think that a man on the brink of mania, thrust suddenly into such aplace in the dim flickering light, would be hurried to his doom by fright,” she wrote “We loved theplace dearly.”

On the opposite side of the hall was the much larger living room, with a piano and harp OnTuesday, May 16, Custer called out for Libbie, and asked her to come into the living room, where shefound her husband and General Terry

Once Libbie had taken her seat, Custer shut the door and turned to his commanding officer

“General Terry,” he said, “a man usually means what he says when he brings his wife to listen to hisstatements I want to say that reports are circulating that I do not want to go out to the campaign underyou But I want you to know that I do want to go and serve under you, not only that I value you as asoldier, but as a friend and a man.”

What Custer declined to mention was that eight days earlier, while still in St Paul, he had bragged

to another army officer that once the regiment headed west from Fort Lincoln, he planned “to swingclear of Terry,” just as he’d done with Stanley back in 1873 It was a foolish and appallinglyungrateful thing to say, especially since Terry had drafted the telegram that enabled Custer to rejoinhis regiment Even worse, the officer to whom Custer was speaking was one of Terry’s close friends

Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways thatwent far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking Soon after making his claims aboutbreaking free of Terry, Custer must have realized how stupid he’d been It turned out that Terry didnot hear about Custer’s boast until later that fall, but Custer didn’t know that Before they departedfrom Fort Lincoln, he knew he must assure General Terry that his loyalty was unwavering

Terry was known for his congenial manner, but he was no fool Ever since the Seventh Cavalry hadcome under his jurisdiction back in 1873, Custer had refused to go through proper channels While

testifying before Congress that spring he’d claimed that his regiment had received a shipment of grainfrom the War Department that had undoubtedly been stolen from the Indian agencies Custer, ofcourse, had neglected to check with Terry before making the claim, and as Terry knew from the start,there was nothing improper about the grain Custer had subsequently recanted in writing what hadbeen one of the centerpieces of his testimony in Washington.

He might attempt to cast himself as the noble truthsayer victimized by an implacable tyrant, but aswas now obvious to Terry, no one had done more to undermine Custer’s career than Custer himself

He was an impulsive blabbermouth, but he was also the most experienced Indian fighter in the DakotaTerritory, and Terry, fifty years old and very content with his office job in St Paul, needed him Itremained to be seen whether Custer’s endearingly earnest declaration of fealty was for real

On the morning of May 17, a thick gray mist blanketed Fort Lincoln It had been raining for several

days, and the water-soaked parade ground had been chopped and churned into a slippery alkalinegumbo When the Seventh Cavalry assembled for its final circuit of the garrison in the foggy early-dawn twilight, it was about as dour and depressing a scene as could be imagined

All spring the wives of the officers and enlisted men had been haunted by a strange, seeminglyunaccountable sense of doom A month earlier, when the wife of Lieutenant Francis Gibson learnedthat her husband had been offered a transfer from Benteen’s company to one under Custer’s immediatecommand, she had felt a “weird something” grip her soul Even though she knew it was the best thingfor both her husband’s career and her own living situation, she insisted that her husband refuse thetransfer

Another officer’s wife, Annie Yates, dreamed that Custer had been shot in the head by an Indian.When she told Custer of her dream, he responded, “I cannot die before my time comes, and if by abullet in the head—Why not?”

Even Libbie, who had married Custer at the height of the Civil War, when a deadly battle was analmost daily occurrence, could not maintain her usual composure during those last days before theregiment’s departure Custer’s striker (the military equivalent of a servant), John Burkman, had been

in the kitchen of the general’s residence when he overheard Custer attempting to comfort his weepingwife “I can’t help it,” she cried out “I just can’t help it I wish Grant hadn’t let you go.”

On the day of their departure, both Terry and Custer were determined to lay to rest these fears with

a rousing display of the Seventh’s unparalleled military might As the regiment splashed triumphantlyinto the garrison, the band, conducted by five-foot two-inch Felix Vinatieri, a graduate of the NaplesConservatory of Music, struck up “Garry Owen,” a rousing Irish tune made popular in the Civil Warand the regiment’s particular song

Unfortunately, the music did little to ease the fears of the soldiers’ families Custer and Libbiewere at the head of the column, and as they passed the quarters of the Arikara scouts, they could seethe wives crouched on the ground, their heads bowed in sorrow Next, they passed the residences ofthe enlisted men’s families, known as Laundress Row It was here, recalled Libbie, that

my heart entirely failed me Mothers, with streaming eyes, held their little ones out atarm’s length for one last look at the departing father The toddlers among the children,unnoticed by their elders, had made a mimic column of their own With their handkerchiefstied to sticks in lieu of flags, and beating old tin pans for drums, they strode lustily back and

forth in imitation of the advancing soldiers They were fortunately too young to realize whythe mothers wailed out their farewells.

By the time they reached the officers’ quarters, the band had moved on to “The Girl I Left BehindMe.” The wives, who had been standing bravely at their doors to wave good-bye, immediatelymelted in despair and retreated inside their homes It was not the glorious departure Terry and Custerhad been hoping for But for Libbie, the most eerie and unnerving part of the regiment’s leave-takingwas yet to come

Custer had made arrangements for both Libbie and his younger sister, Maggie, who was married toLieutenant James Calhoun, to accompany the regiment to the first campsite on the Heart River, aboutfifteen miles away, and then return to Fort Lincoln the following day Soon after leaving the garrison,

as they mounted a steep hillside that led to a wide rolling plain to the west, Libbie looked back on thecolumn of twelve hundred men, spread out for almost two miles, and saw an astonishing sight

By that time, the sun had risen far enough above the Missouri River to the east that its rays hadbegun to dispel the thick mist in the valley below As white tendrils of dissipating fog rose up into thewarm blue sky above, a mirage appeared A reflection of about half the line of cavalry becamevisible in the brightening, mist-swirled air above them, making it seem as if the troopers of theSeventh Cavalry were marching both on the earth and in the sky From a scientific point of view, thephenomenon, known as a superior image, is easily accounted for: Light rays from the warm upper airhad caromed off the colder air in the valley below to create a duplicate image above the heads of thetroopers But for Libbie, whose fears for her husband and his regiment had been building all spring,

“the future of the heroic band seemed to be revealed.”

They camped beside the beautiful cottonwood-lined Heart River, in a flat, grassy area surrounded by

rounded, sheltering hills Before the tents were set up, the soldiers combed the area for rattlesnakes,some of which proved to be as thick as a child’s arm Custer had several members of his familyaccompanying him on the expedition In addition to his younger brother Tom, recently promoted tocaptain, there was his brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, and Custer’s twenty-eight-year-oldbrother, Boston, who was entered into the regimental rolls as a civilian guide Accompanying Custerfor the first time and serving as a herder was his eighteen-year-old nephew, Harry Reed Reed andhis uncle shared the same nickname of “Autie,” which dated back to Custer’s first attempts topronounce his middle name of Armstrong

At some point Libbie and Custer retired to their tent, where Custer’s striker had placed someboards across two sawhorses and topped them with a mattress From the first, Custer and Libbie hadenjoyed a passionate physical relationship When the two were courting during the Civil War, Libbiekept a diary in which she recorded their first extended kiss “I never was kissed so much before,” shewrote “I thought he would eat me My forehead and my eyelids and cheeks and lips bear testimony—and his star scratched my face.”

After their marriage, she began to learn that her new husband had his quirks Despite being a eyed warrior, he seemed to be always washing his hands He also brushed his teeth after every meal,and even carried his toothbrush with him into battle He had a sensitive stomach; she later recalledhow “the heartiest appetite would desert him if an allusion to anything unpleasant was made attable.” Although he and his brothers liked to roughhouse and play practical jokes with one another,

wild-and Libbie’s wild-and Custer’s letters are full of ardor wild-and romance, Custer was also a man of long,seemingly impenetrable silences Once, after the two had sat side by side for close to an hour, Libbieattempted to nudge him into conversation by claiming, “I know just what you have been thinking.” Butinstead of revealing his thoughts, Custer merely chuck-led and lapsed once again into silence.

Custer had a winning, if unrealistic, belief in his own perfectability Just as he had once stoppedswearing and drinking alcohol, he would put an end to his gambling, he assured her, but the poker andhorse racing debts continued to pile up, and they were always broke And then there was the issue ofwomen

From the start, Libbie had known there were others Even during their courtship, Custer had alsobeen trading letters with an acquaintance of hers from Monroe If Frederick Benteen is to be believed,Custer had frequent sex with his African American cook, Eliza, during the Civil War, with theCheyenne captive Monahsetah during and after the Washita campaign, with at least one officer’s wife,and with a host of prostitutes There is a suspicious letter written by Custer to the young and beautifulsculptress Vinnie Ream, who is known to have had passionate affairs with General Sherman andFranz Liszt, among others In the fall of 1870, Libbie and Custer reached some sort of crisis, and in afragment of a letter Custer expresses his hope that “however erratic, wild, or unseemly my conductwith others may have been,” he had not lost forever Libbie’s love

The two seem to have put this incident behind them, perhaps in part because Libbie could give just

as well as she received Benteen claimed that Custer’s wild ride to Libbie back in 1867 had beenprompted by an anonymous letter warning that one of his officers, the charming, well-educated, andalcoholic Lieutenant Thomas Weir, was paying too much attention to his wife Custer latercomplained about Libbie’s correspondence with two of the regiment’s more handsome officers: thestrapping Canadian Lieutenant William Cooke and the dark and moody Irishman Captain MylesKeogh

In the end, it was their mutual belief in destiny—specifically Custer’s—that saved their marriage.Soon after the Washita campaign, Custer had melodramatically written Libbie, “In years longnumbered with the past when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to

be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great I desired to link my name with acts and men and in such

a manner as to be a mark of honor, not only to the present but to future generations.” Libbie could nothave agreed more As she told the future wife of one of Custer’s officers, “[W]e army women feelthat we are especially privileged, because we are making history.”

The move to the Dakota Territory seems to have reinvigorated their marriage During theYellowstone campaign in 1873, Libbie spent the summer in Michigan awaiting the completion of FortLincoln Her time at home gave her a glimpse into the life she might have led (“so monotonous, socommonplace”) had she married someone besides Custer and raised a family “I am perfectlyoverwhelmed with gratitude,” she wrote “Autie, your career is something wonderful Swept along as

I am on the current of your eventful life [e]verything seems to fit into every other event like theblocks in a child’s puzzle Does it not seem so strange to you?”

Even more exciting, his long, well-written letters about his adventures along the Yellowstoneshowed her where their future lay “My ambition for you in the world of letters almost takes my heartout of my body,” she wrote “I get so excited about it [T]he public shall not lose sight of you

[D]o not fail to keep notes of everything that happened.” The following year Custer published My

Life on the Plains to great acclaim (although Benteen later called it My Lie on the Plains), and he

was even then, in the spring of 1876, preparing a memoir of the Civil War That winter he’d beencontacted by the country’s leading speakers bureau, the Redpath Agency, and plans were already inplace for him to begin a lucrative speaking tour when he returned from the West in the fall.

The only problem with this plan was that Custer had so far proved to be a dismal public speaker.Despite his natural charisma on the battlefield, he twisted and turned before an assembled audience,speaking in rapid-fire bursts that were almost impossible to understand Fortunately, Custer’s bestmale friend was the noted Shakespearean actor Lawrence Barrett, and Barrett had agreed to helpCuster prepare for the tour

Indeed, as Libbie was well aware, her true rival for Autie’s love (at least the kind of love shecared about) was not a woman, but Barrett, whom Custer had first met in St Louis almost a decadeago “They joyed in each other as women do,” she wrote, “and I tried not to look when they met orparted, while they gazed with tears into each other’s eyes and held hands like exuberant girls.” Theprior winter, when Libbie and Custer had been in New York City, Barrett had been starring as

Cassius in a lavish production of Julius Caesar, a politically themed play that had special relevance

during the last days of the Grant administration By the end of their stay in New York, Custer had seenhis friend perform in the play at least forty times

Despite the play’s title, Julius Caesar is really about the relationship between Cassius and his

friend Marcus Brutus, and if Barrett’s edgy personality was perfectly suited to Cassius, Custer musthave seen much of himself in Brutus After assassinating the increasingly power-hungry emperor forthe future good of Rome, Cassius and Brutus learn that Caesar loyalist Marc Antony is rallying hissoldiers against them Cassius, whose motivations from the start have been less than pure, is forletting Marc Antony attack first, but Brutus, ever the forthright idealist, will have none of it Theymust act and act quickly

There is a tide in the affairs of men [Brutus insists]

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the Current when it serves

Or lose our ventures

Forty times Custer watched Brutus deliver that speech Forty times he watched as Brutus andCassius led their forces into war Forty times he watched them struggle with the realization that allwas lost and that they must fall on their own swords, but not before Brutus, whom Marc Antony laterdubs “the noblest Roman of them all,” predicts, “I shall have glory by this losing day.”

On May 27, nine days after saying good-bye to their husbands, Libbie Custer and a group of officers’

wives made their way down to the Fort Lincoln landing on the Missouri River The steamboat Far

West had arrived that morning, and her captain, Grant Marsh, was supervising his thirty-man crew in

the transfer of tons of forage, ammunition, and other supplies onto the boat’s lower deck By the end

of the day, the Far West would be headed up the Missouri for her eventual rendezvous with the

Seventh Cavalry on the Yellowstone

When a riverboat came to the fort, it was customary for the master to host the officers’ wives in the

boat’s dining room, and Marsh made sure that Libbie and her entourage were provided with “asdainty a luncheon as the larder of the boat would afford.” As the women took their seats at the table inthe narrow, nicely outfitted dining room, Libbie requested that Captain Marsh come and join them.

This was a duty Marsh had hoped to avoid He’d chosen the Far West because it was the most

spartan of his boats She had plenty of room for freight but minimal accommodations for passengers

As he later told his biographer, he “did not wish to be burdened with many passengers for whosesafety and comfort he would be responsible.” Since Mrs Custer had a reputation for following herhusband wherever he went, Marsh had a pretty good idea why she wanted him to join her for lunch

He soon found himself sitting between Libbie and the wife of Lieutenant Algernon Smith The two

of them were, he noticed, “at particular pains to treat him cordially.” And just as he’d suspected, oncethe meal had come to an end, they requested that he talk to them privately

When Libbie and Custer had parted on the morning of May 18, it had been a heart-wrenching scene.Custer’s striker, John Burkman, remembered “how she clung to Custer at the last, her arms tightaround his neck and how she cried.” From the hill overlooking the campsite along the Heart River,Burkman and Custer watched her ride back to Fort Lincoln “She looked so little and so young,”Burkman remembered, “and she was leaning way over with her head bent and we knew she wascrying We watched till she was just a speck way off on the plains.”

Libbie’s only consolation since her husband’s departure was the hope that Marsh would take both

her and her good friend Nettie Smith on the Far West She soon discovered that the riverboat’s

captain had other ideas

Grant Marsh was not one to be trifled with Over the course of his long life, he earned the respect

of such luminaries as Mark Twain, General Ulysses S Grant, and Sitting Bull Late in life, he picked

up a scruffy young writer named John Neihardt, who was working on a book about the Missouri

River When Neihardt, who was destined to write the classic Black Elk Speaks, met Marsh in 1908,

the seventy-four-year-old river pilot impressed him as “a born commander.” “It struck me,” Neihardtwrote, “that I should like to have [his face] cast in bronze to look at whenever a vacillating moodmight seize me.”

That afternoon in 1876, Marsh explained that he anticipated the voyage to the Yellowstone to be

“both dangerous and uncomfortable,” and then showed Mrs Custer and Mrs Smith the crude nature of

the Far West’s accommodations But Libbie and Nettie still wanted to go.

Marsh was reduced to what he called “a feeble subterfuge.” Perhaps when the more comfortable

steamboat Josephine stopped at Fort Lincoln, her master would take the ladies to their husbands.

Until then, they’d have to wait

Deeply disappointed, Libbie and Nettie Smith returned to their homes in the garrison “It isinfinitely worse to be left behind,” Libbie wrote, “a prey to all the horrors of imagining what may behappening to the one you love You slowly eat your heart out with anxiety and to endure suchsuspense is simply the hardest of all trials that come to the soldier’s wife.”

By the next morning, Marsh and the Far West were headed up the Missouri for the Yellowstone, the

magnificent east-flowing river that cut directly across the territory occupied by Sitting Bull’s band ofIndians Geographically speaking, the Yellowstone was one of the least known rivers in the UnitedStates Terry and Custer’s map of the region dated back to before the Civil War and was full ofinaccuracies What current information the army possessed had been gathered just a year before by an

exploring expedition also transported by Grant Marsh.

During that expedition in 1875, Marsh took careful note of the Yellowstone’s many north-flowingtributaries, including the Powder, Tongue, Rosebud, and Bighorn rivers Marsh even ventured twelvemiles up the Bighorn, where the channel became so clogged with mud that it was generally assumed

he could go no farther But as Marsh would prove almost exactly a month after leaving Fort Lincoln torendezvous with Custer, it was in fact possible, given proper motivation, to take a steamboat anotherthirty miles to the Bighorn’s confluence with a river called the Little Bighorn

CHAPTER 2

The Dream

In late May of 1876, as Grant Marsh navigated the Far West from his lofty pilothouse of wood, iron,

and glass, Sitting Bull, hundreds of miles to the west, mounted a tower of his own Near the RosebudRiver, just south of the Yellowstone, there is a butte By defini-tion taller than it is wide, a butte isformed when a surface layer of unyielding rock protects the underlying sedimentary layers fromerosion The result can be weirdly dramatic, creating what appears to be a vigorous upwelling ofstone that is really something altogether different: a freestanding core sample of what the wind, rain,and frost have whittled from the surrounding plain

Not far from this eroded projection of rock-capped earth was a village of more than four hundredtepees spread out for almost a mile along the bright green valley of the north-flowing river Some ofthe tepees were a sooty brown; others were an immaculate white, thanks to a fresh set of betweenfifteen and seventeen female buffalo skins—the flesh and fur stripped away with elk-bone scrapersand the hide made pliable with the buffalo’s mashed brains A pony herd of several thousand spreadout across the valley Hovering over the village, where dogs lounged expectantly beside the womenand their cooking fires and where packs of children played games and where the warriors talkedamong themselves, was a bluish cloud of dust and smoke

Sitting Bull was about forty-five years old, his legs bowed from a boyhood of riding ponies, hisleft foot maimed by an old bullet wound that caused him to amble lopsidedly as he searched the top ofthe butte for a place to sit, finally settling on a flat, moss-padded rock He’d been only twenty-fiveyears old when he suffered the injury to his foot as part of a horse-stealing raid against his people’shated enemies, the Crows During a tense standoff, he had the temerity to step forward with his gun inone hand and his buffalo-hide shield in the other and challenge the Crow leader to a one-on-oneencounter

Across from him, standing proudly in front of a long line of mounted warriors, with his bangscombed up in the pompadour style of the Crows, was the chief Almost simultaneously, the Crowleader and the impudent young warrior began to run toward each other

Sitting Bull was not only a fearless warrior, he was also a singer of uncommon talent Musicplayed a fundamental part in his people’s daily life There were songs of war, songs of play,ceremonial songs, story songs, council songs, songs for dances, hunting songs, and dream songs.Sitting Bull had a high, resonant singing voice, and as he charged the Crow chief in 1856, he sang,

Comrades, whoever runs away,

He is a woman, they say;

Therefore, through many trials,

My life is short!

In this haiku-like song, Sitting Bull expressed the credo of a warrior society that had come tostunning fruition amid a tumultuous century of expansion, adaptation, and almost continual conflict.The French traders and missionaries who first encountered Sitting Bull’s ancestors at the headwaters

of the Mississippi River in modern Minnesota called them the Sioux—a corruption of the Chippewaword for snakes or enemies By the end of the seventeenth century, the Chippewa’s French-suppliedguns had forced many of the Sioux west toward the Missouri River, where they came to depend on thebuffalo as the mainstay of their way of life When the French explorer Pierre Radisson met the Sioux

in 1662 he described them as “The Nation of the Beef.”

By the middle of the eighteenth century, a combination of events had set the stage for the rise of thewestern, or Teton, Sioux Being a nomadic people, they were less affected by the diseases that began

to devastate their more sedentary rivals along the Missouri River The gradual acquisition of firearmsmade the Sioux an increasingly formidable foe, but it was the horse, obtained in trade from tribes tothe south, that catapulted them into becoming what one scholar has termed “hyper-Indians.”

By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it

as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows Over the nexthundred years the Sioux continued to expand their territory, eventually forcing the Crows to retreat allthe way to the Bighorn River more than two hundred miles to the west, while also carrying on raids tothe north and south against the Assiniboine, Shoshone, Pawnee, Gros Ventre, and Omaha “Theselands once belonged to [other tribes],” the Oglala Black Hawk explained, “but we whipped thosenations out of them and in this we did what the white men do when they want the lands of Indians.”

For the Teton Sioux, who called themselves the Lakota, war was an integral part of everyday life

A warrior kept obsessive account of his battle honors, which were best won in hand-to-hand combat.Instead of killing the enemy, a warrior’s highest accolade was achieved by hitting or even justtouching an opponent, known as counting coup Other ways to win honors were to rescue a fallencomrade, suffer a wound, or capture the enemy’s horses Despite the largely ceremonial nature ofplains warfare (which has been called “a gorgeous mounted game of tag”), the life of a Lakota

warrior was perilous, and “Hokahe!”—meaning “Come on, let’s go!”—was the traditional cry

before battle On that memorable day in 1856, as Sitting Bull sprinted toward the Crow chief, hecelebrated the violence and transience of the Lakota warrior by singing, “Through many trials / Mylife is short.”

The Crow was the first to drop to one knee, swing his flintlock muzzle-loader into position, andfire The bullet punctured the hide of Sitting Bull’s shield and slammed into the sole of his left foot,entering at the toe and exiting at the heel It was now Sitting Bull’s turn to aim his rifle and fire Amid

a cloud of black powder smoke, the Crow chief tumbled to the ground, and taking up his knife, SittingBull hobbled toward his fallen opponent and stabbed him in the heart With the death of their leader,the Crows quickly fled, and Sitting Bull—having not just shot but stabbed the man who’d injured him(and a chief, at that)—was now a Lakota warrior without peer

The history of the Lakota is found in their winter counts, chronological records in which a pictograph,

often accompanied by some commentary, tells of the single event by which a year is remembered.With the help of the winter counts, several of which go back as far as 1700, it is possible to chronicle

the gradual creep of Western culture into Lakota life.

It begins indirectly, with the acquisition of significant numbers of guns and iron kettles in 1707–8;references to horses also start to appear about this time, and in 1779–80, smallpox makes its first but

by no means last appearance In 1791–92, the Lakota, who have already seen their first white man,record seeing their first white woman, soon followed by the arrival of French fur traders, and in1805–6 by the Lewis and Clark expedition There are references to the first time the Lakota seewagons (1830–31) and to the Laramie Treaty of 1851 (“First issue of goods winter,” the count reads).But what dominates the winter counts in the second half of the nineteenth century are not theincreasing number of white incursions into Lakota territory, but the ebb and flow of intertribalwarfare Even in 1864–65, when an uprising of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota triggered Americansoldiers to attack the Lakota (who were guilty, government officials claimed, of harboring theuprising’s leader, Inkpaduta), most of the winter counts make no mention of these assaults With oneexception, which records “First fight with white men,” the rest of the more than half dozen wintercounts at the Smithsonian Institution refer to 1864–65 as the year “Four Crows caught stealing horsesand were killed.”

The winter counts eloquently illustrate how completely the day-today world engages a society—particularly a thriving society that has followed success after success in its triumphant surge into anew and fruitful land Hunting buffalo and fighting tribal enemies was an all-absorbing way of lifearound which the Lakota had created a beautifully intricate and self-contained culture But it was aculture with an Achilles’ heel The buffalo, Sitting Bull’s namesake, was essential to their existence.Their food, their lodges, their clothing, their weapons, even their fuel source (dried buffalo dung)came from the North American bison, and if what had already occurred among their allies to thesouth, the Cheyenne, was any indication, the buffalo might not be around much longer

With the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869, the once limitless buffalo population tothe south had collapsed, and the Cheyenne had been forced to turn to government reservations, wherethey received annual allotments of food and clothing The experiences of the Cheyenne were certainlysobering, but as late as the 1870s, the buffalo herds to the north around the Yellowstone River werestill sizable Besides, even in the best of times, the buffalo supply had varied dramatically from year

to year One or even two bad years did not necessarily mean that disaster was imminent, especiallysince the Lakota’s religious beliefs told them that the true source of the buffalo was not of this world,but beneath it, inside the earth

From this distance in time, it seems obvious: After more than a century of dramatic, seeminglypreordained expansion, the Lakota were about to face inescapable catastrophe when their foodsource, the buffalo, disappeared Not so obvious, especially today, is what a society about to confrontsuch changes is supposed to do about it

The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm As the officers andmen of the Seventh Cavalry—not to mention their families—could attest, fear of the future can imbueeven the most trivial event with overwhelming significance It was no accident that Sitting Bull,renowned for the gift of prophecy, emerged as his people’s leader in the darkest, most desperate time

of their history

Sitting Bull later claimed that even before he was born, when he was still adrift in amniotic fluid,

he’d been scrutinizing the world “I was still in my mother’s insides,” he told a newspaper reporter in

1877, “when I began to study all about my people I studied about smallpox, that was killing mypeople—the great sickness that was killing the women and children I was so interested that I turnedover on my side The God Almighty must have told me at that time that I would be the man to bethe judge of all the other Indians—a big man, to decide for them all their ways.” Sitting Bull was

much more than a brave warrior He was a wicasa wakan: a holy man with an unusual relationship

with the Great Mystery that the Lakota called Wakan Tanka

He could see into the ungraspable essence of life—the powerful and incomprehensible forces thatmost people only dimly perceive but to which all humanity must pay homage Dreams and visionsprovided glimpses into this enigmatic world of ultimate meaning; so did nature, and in conversationswith animals and birds, Sitting Bull found confirmation of his role as leader of his people

One of these transformative encounters occurred in the Black Hills beside beautiful Sylvan Lake

He was standing among the huge gray rocks that bound this clear pool of blue water when he heardsinging from somewhere up above:

My father has given me this nation;

In protecting them I have a hard time.

He assumed the song came from a man, but when he climbed to the top of the rocks, he watched as aneagle flew into the sky

A vision could occur at any pivotal moment in a Lakota’s life After days without food and water,alone, often on a mountaintop or butte, he might receive what the Oglala holy man Sword called “acommunication from the Wakan-Tanka to one of mankind.” The vision was not hazy or ill-defined

It was real “It hits you sharp and clear like an electric shock,” the Lakota John Fire recounted “Youare wide awake and, suddenly, there is a person standing next to you who you know can’t be there atall yet you are not dreaming; your eyes are open.”

When the renowned Oglala warrior Crazy Horse was twenty years old, he received the vision thatcame to define his life After fasting for several days, he found himself staggering down a hill toward

a small lake He collapsed in the knee-deep water, and once he’d struggled to his feet and startedback to shore he saw a man on horseback rise out of the lake “He told Crazy Horse,” the interpreterBilly Garnett recalled, “not to wear a war bonnet; not to tie up his horse’s tail.” Traditionally aLakota warrior tied up his pony’s tail in a knot The man from the lake insisted that a horse needed histail for balance when jumping streams and for swatting flies “So Crazy Horse never tied his horse’stail,” Garnett continued, “never wore a war bonnet.” The man from the lake also told him not to painthis face like other warriors but to rub himself with dirt from a gopher hole and to knit blades of grassinto his hair He also said that Crazy Horse could not be killed by a bullet Instead, the man from thelake predicted, “his death would come by being held and stabbed; as it actually was.”

The vision in the shallows of the lake transformed Crazy Horse into his tribe’s greatest warrior

“[W]hen I came out,” he told his cousin Flying Hawk, “I was born by my mother.”

Central to Lakota identity was the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman and her gift of the sacred

calf pipe In ancient times, the buffalo had been ferocious creatures at war with the ancestors of theLakota With the intercession of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, who’d been sent by the BuffaloPeople, the Lakota came into symbiotic harmony with their former enemies, who provided them withfood and the means to grow as a people

The White Buffalo Calf Woman first appeared to two young hunters, who were on a hill searchingfor game when they saw a young woman dressed in white buckskins with a bundle on her back Shebegan to approach them, and as she drew near, they saw that she was very beautiful Her beauty was

as unworldly as it was wonderful (what the Lakota described as wakan), and one of the hunters

became consumed with lust When he told his companion of his desire, his friend chastised him,saying, “[S]urely this is a wakan woman.” Soon the White Buffalo Calf Woman was very near them.She laid down her bundle and invited the hunter with the lustful thoughts to approach A cloudsuddenly enveloped the two of them, and when it lifted, the only thing left of the young hunter was apile of whitened bones

“Behold what you see!” admonished the woman “I am coming to your people and wish to talk withyour chief.” She told the hunter how she wanted the villagers to prepare for her arrival They were tocreate a large council lodge, where all the people were to assemble There she would tell themsomething of “great importance.”

The chief and his people did as she instructed and were waiting when she was seen approaching inthe distance Her movements were strange and magical, and suddenly she was inside the lodge andstanding before the chief She took the bundle from her back and held it in both hands “Within thisbundle there is a sacred pipe,” she said “With this you will, during the winters to come, send yourvoices to Wakan Tanka All the things of the universe are joined to you who smoke the pipe—all sendtheir voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and witheverything.”

The pipe had a bowl made of red stone and a wooden stem The White Buffalo Calf Woman turned

to leave, then stopped to say, “Always remember how sacred this pipe is, for it will take you to theend I am leaving now, but I shall look back upon your people in every age, and at the end I shallreturn.”

She stepped out of the lodge, but after walking just a short distance, she looked back toward thechief and his people and sat down When she next stood again, she had turned into a red and brownbuffalo calf The calf walked a little ways, lay down, and with her eyes on the villagers, rolled on theground When she stood up once again, she was a white buffalo She walked a little farther, rolled onher back, and this time she was a black buffalo After bowing four times (the Lakota’s sacrednumber), she walked over the hill and was gone

Sitting Bull’s nephew White Bull remembered how important the pipe was to his uncle, how hefilled the pipe with tobacco, lit it, and, holding the bowl with his right hand, pointed the stem into thesky as he pleaded with Wakan Tanka to assist his people After pointing the pipe in the four sacreddirections, he peered into the future and spoke “He could foretell anything,” White Bull remembered

On that spring day in 1876, when Sitting Bull climbed the butte near the Rosebud River, he knew that

there were soldiers on the north bank of the Yellowstone River His scouts had also reported thatsoldiers to the south were preparing to march in their direction But from where would they attackfirst? Once perched on a mossy rock, Sitting Bull began to pray until he fell asleep and dreamed

In his dream he saw a huge puffy white cloud drifting so sedately overhead that it seemed almostmotionless The cloud, he noticed, was shaped like a Lakota village nestled under snow-toppedmountains On the horizon to the east, he saw the faint brown smudge of an approaching dust storm.Faster and faster the storm approached until he realized that at the center of the swirling cloud of dust

was a regiment of horse-mounted soldiers.

The dust-shrouded troopers continued to pick up speed until they collided with the big white cloud

in a crash of lightning and a burst of rain In an instant, the dust—and the soldiers—had been washedaway, and all was quiet and peaceful as the huge cloud continued to drift toward the horizon andfinally disappeared

He now knew from where the attack was going to come—not from the north or from the south, butfrom the east

CHAPTER 3

Hard Ass

Sitting Bull had dreamed of an army washed away by a burst of rain By the end of the first week of

the Seventh Cavalry’s slow slog west from Fort Lincoln, the prediction was about to come true

Soon after leaving their first campsite on the Heart River, the column was hit by a furiousthunderstorm At noon on the next day, hail the size of hickory nuts clattered out of the sky, beating onthe heads and shoulders of the men and nearly stampeding the mules The next morning they awoke to

a bitterly cold rain that continued all day And so it went

Rivers that were barely discernible trickles for most of the year were transformed into brown,rain-pelted torrents The engineers built crude bridges of boards and brush, and gradually the slender-wheeled wagons made it across, but the going was agonizingly slow And then there was the mud—glutinous, clinging, and slippery, so slippery that even when pushed by hand the sunken wagon wheelsspun uselessly and the men and horses, exhausted and cold, wallowed and slithered in the dark grayalkaline slime of a wet spring in North Dakota “Everybody is more or less disgusted except me ,” Custer wrote Libbie “The elements seem against us.”

There were occasional days of sun, when blue and green replaced the gray, when, blinking andwith a squint, they gazed upon a world of transcendent beauty On May 24, flowers suddenlyappeared all around them “During this march we encountered a species of primrose,” wroteLieutenant Edward Maguire, head of the column’s engineer corps “The flowers were very beautiful,and as they were crushed under the horses’ feet they gave forth a protest of the most delicate andwelcome odor.”

Most welcome, indeed

The smells associated with this column of approximately twelve hundred men and sixteen hundredhorses and mules were pungent and inescapable—an eye-watering combination of horsehair andsweaty human reek The stench was particularly bad at night, when all of them were contained within

a half-mile-wide parallelogram of carefully arranged tents, picketed horses, and freshly dug latrines

If it was too wet to light a fire, the men lived on hardtack and cold sowbelly doused with vinegar andsalt Since wet boots shrank when they dried, it was necessary to wear them at night as the troopers,swaddled like mummies in their damp blankets, lay side by side in their five-and-a-half-foot-widetents, “all the time getting,” remembered one cavalryman, “the full benefit of the aroma that arrivesfrom the sweat of your horse’s sides and back, as it creeps up out of the blanket.”

On May 27, after the column had been groping aimlessly through a cold, claustrophobic fog, the sunfinally dispersed the mist, and they were presented with a sight that awed all of them: the badlands ofthe Little Missouri River “I cannot attempt any description of ‘the bad lands,’ ” General Terry wrote

his sister in St Paul “They are so utterly unlike anything which you have ever seen that nodescription of them could convey to you any ideas of what they are like Horribly bare and desolate ingeneral & yet picturesque at times to the extreme Naked hills of mud, clay & partially formed stonebroken into the most fantastic forms, & of all hues from dull grey to an almost fiery red Sometimeswith easy slopes & sometimes almost perpendicular, but water worn & fissured walls.”

Sitting Bull was supposed to be here, on the Little Missouri River, but so far they had found almost

no recent sign of Indians The Lakota leader was probably long gone, but just to make sure, Terryresolved to send Custer on a reconnaissance expedition up the Little Missouri At 5 a.m on May 30,Custer and a select group of troopers and scouts left the encampment on the east bank of the river andheaded south

By all accounts, Custer looked good on a horse “[He] sat his charger,” remembered one officer, “as

if ‘to the manor born.’ ” He was five feet eleven inches tall and wore a 38 jacket and 9C boots Hisweight fluctuated from a low of 143 pounds at the end of the grueling Kansas campaign back in 1869

to a muscle-packed high of 170 On that morning in late May, he was dressed in a fringed whitebuckskin suit, with a light gray, wide-brimmed hat set firmly on his head The famed “Buffalo Bill”Cody’s iconic western outfit was an almost perfect match to Custer’s buckskin suit, which had beenspecially made for him by an Irish sergeant in the Seventh Cavalry who had once been a tailor

But for Custer’s striker, John Burkman, there was something missing Custer was known for hislong hair, but in 1876 he, like many men approaching forty, was beginning to go bald Before leavingFort Lincoln, he and another officer with thinning hair, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, “had the clippersrun over their heads.” This meant that the former “boy general” of the Civil War with the famouslyflowing locks now looked decidedly middle-aged “He looked so unnatural after that,” Burkmanremembered

But even if, Samson-like, he had lost his blond curls, Custer (who could leap to a stand from flat onhis back) showed no sign of diminished strength That day his endurance in the saddle provedexceptional, even for him The inhospitable terrain required them to cross the sucking quicksands ofthe Little Missouri River a total of thirty-four times before they finally made it back to camp, mud-spattered and saddle-sore, with no news about Sitting Bull “I breakfasted at four [a.m.], was in thesaddle at five, and between that hour and 6 p.m I rode fifty miles over a rough country, unknown toeverybody, and only myself for a guide,” he proudly wrote Libbie that night The day’s rideimpressed even Custer’s normally impassive Arikara scout Bloody Knife, who, Custer reported,

“looks on in wonder at me because I never get tired, and says no other man could ride all day andnever sleep.”

Custer had mastered the art of the strategic nap During the brief halts typical of a day’s march, hewould lie down in the shade of a cottonwood tree and, with his feet crossed and his dogs gatheredaround him, fall almost instantly asleep Yet another secret to his seemingly inexhaustible endurancewas the fact that he had at his disposal two magnificent horses: Vic (for Victory) and Dandy Sincehorses of any kind were in short supply in the Seventh Cavalry (seventy-eight unmounted trooperswere forced to march on foot in their high-heeled cavalry boots), this gave Custer an obviousadvantage, particularly since he routinely changed horses every three hours Adding to his edge wasthe fact that while each trooper was required to carry close to seventy-five pounds of personalequipment, all of Custer’s baggage was normally transported by wagon Fresh from an invigorating